


Hit Me With Your Best Shot

by Tozette



Category: Naruto
Genre: And a little bit of, Demisexuality, F/M, Strength Kink, blanket permission for podfic or translation, is a really weird tag to be using for naruto but here we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-25
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2018-05-03 06:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5281052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sasuke is actually eighteen the first time he looks at Sakura and realises abruptly that he wants her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hit Me With Your Best Shot

**Author's Note:**

> In which being close friends with Sakura actually frightens Sasuke a lot less than being physically attracted to her.

Sasuke is actually eighteen the first time he looks at Sakura and realises abruptly that he wants her.

He knows he cares, however uncomfortable that is, and he - he lets her touch him, like he doesn't with most people. A hand on his arm, a bump with her shoulder, the least awful medical examinations he's ever experienced. But he's never looked at a person before, felt a heavy hot curling in his gut, a strange catch in his breath - things in him, from his brain to his toes, coil and contract in ways he... hadn't actually ever expected to happen.

He's eighteen and he's never wanted anyone. Not for sex. Not... like that. He's... he's been sort of assuming he's immune.

Sasuke is not immune.

Sasuke is eighteen when Sakura hefts a missing-nin one handed, holds him up by the throat, eyes shining and teeth bared and -

He can see the shift of muscle and the pull of tendons beneath her skin. The man trapped under her hand wheezes and flexes and -

Sasuke stops breathing for a second. He is  _so not immune_.

They ask their questions while the missin-nin's feet dangle in the air, while his fingernails scrape at Sakura's hand, desperately trying to wedge their way between her skin and his.

He answers their questions.

Sakura crushes his windpipe. It's  _effortless_.

Sasuke's skin shivers all on its own. He doesn't actually realise he's made a sound until Sakura turns toward him.

"Sasuke?" she asks. "Are you all right?"

He blinks. "Yes," he says, and oh, his voice is... wrong. Deeper. Hoarse. He wasn't expecting that to-

"Are you blushing?" Naruto's eyebrows are raised.

Sakura looks a little confused.

And Kakashi has disappeared completely.

Sasuke blinks again. "We need to go," he says, but what he means is  _I need to go, right now, quite far away_. He doesn't, if only because him freaking out and sprinting over the border might be -  _misconstrued_ , to put it lightly.

But his face is hot and he's not sure what's just happened.

* * *

 

He chalks it up to a strange fluke and puts it out of his mind.

It's less optimism and more denial.

"Stand back," Sakura says a week later, and he steps automatically away from the rock barring entrance to the old fortress.

It is, he thinks, probably something built by Sand during the war, abandoned and reclaimed by an oddly organised group of missing nin out in Rain. They've been tracking them for a while.

An enormous boulder is in their path, moved with somebody's earth jutsu to block off the entrance. It's rock, and so Sasuke's sure he could take it down with a lightning element attack, but -

Sakura walks up to it, balls her right hand into a fist and slams it into the stone. He can see the shock of impact make its way through both Sakura and the rock - but only one of them gives out. With the sound of rending earth, cracks spread from the site of impact and the whole thing begins to crumble.

There's dirt in her air and all over her clothes by the time the mess settles. "Let's go," she says back toward them.

Sasuke has just about forgotten Naruto is even  _present_ , let alone part of their mission. He blinks, once, and struggles to swallow around the dryness of his mouth. He's breathing hard, and he doesn't know when that started.

Sakura sweats when she exerts chakra like that. The sheer concentration it takes to remain in control of such a violent burst of chakra is incredible. So there's a faint line of sweat trailing through the dust on the side of Sakura's neck, and Sasuke understands why. It is perfectly reasonable, natural - there is no reason to stare.

Still. His stomach drops and clenches. It feels like anxiety, but he's not... he's not  _nervous_.

* * *

 

"You're an idiot," says Naruto cheerfully, and Sasuke immediately loses his temper and punches him in the face.

It occurs to him later that attraction and  _panic_  are strangely closely related.

* * *

 

He comes up with weird similes and metaphors, a point of reference in a storm of wants and hungers.

Attraction, Sasuke decides, feeling bewildered as they count missing nin casualties, feels a lot like hypoglycaemia. It's all there, really: sweating, clumsy hands, a certain inexplicable weakness in his knees and a dizzy swooping in his gut.

But it's not just that, either. Attraction is fight or flight. Attraction is all of the hormones in his brain suddenly stopping for a second, fried and helpless, while he stares at her hands. Sakura has long fingers, tapered but strong. She keeps her hands and nails clean.

She rolls bandages, sets traps, skins dinner and sharpens weapons and cooks (very badly) with them, and once they return to an inn Sasuke watches her thump her fist into their table for emphasis.

Sakura doesn't even seem to notice that it cracks under the force.

Sasuke stares at the fine crack beneath her hand for much too long.

There is a brief but intense flash of imagination and he pictures, just for a second, Sakura holding him down between the crack on that table and the impossible strength of her hands. He's seen her punch people through mountain ranges. He knows she could do it.

His heart is going too fast, and there's an unsettling heat curling up low in his abdomen, something that makes his skin feel too tight.

He rises and stalks away, and he knows the others assume he's moody and sulking. Well. Good.

* * *

 

"You can't copy it," Sakura tells him, a few days after their reports are due - and several days before either Kakashi or Naruto will submit theirs, of course.

Sasuke doesn't like the way people in Konoha look at him a lot of the time. There are always isolated stares that leave a heaviness upon him:  _traitor, runaway, missing-nin_. He looks right back at them, mostly.

Here, now, in their training ground with Sakura watching him so earnestly, Sasuke looks at her. There's something apologetic about her posture. Sasuke dislikes it, perhaps even on principle. He's annoyed by her slumped shoulders and lowered eyes.

(He is contrary. Everybody knows it.)

"My strength," she clarifies.

Doubtless. "Aa," he agrees. Of course he can't copy it - or, well. He could copy it in the most technical sense, examine the technique with his sharingan, but he could never truly replicate it. His chakra control is above average, but it's nowhere near as good as hers. It never will be.

"I don't want it," he says, flatly.

"Oh." Sakura's brow furrows - confused, concerned, apologetic, unsure; Sasuke wants to  _shake her_ , but he knows it would make her worse, more annoying, and he scowls instead.

"I thought," she says slowly, in a voice that has an edge of nervousness in it, "because you keep -" she pauses. "You watch, when I use it."

She's noticed. Of course she's  _noticed_ , she would have noticed when she was twelve. He still clenches his fists, feeling tongue-tied and stupid and  _humiliated_. Admitting anything will make him feel vulnerable, a frightened ache building in his stomach, an overwhelming need to lash out instead. He knows he's tensed up but -

"You don't have to explain," Sakura says, watching him cautiously.

He pauses. Settles. He can almost feel the ugly terror in his belly unwind. Five words, and suddenly he can choose, so: "It's impressive," he says, flat and hard and scowling, but he says it.

It's even true. It's not  _all_  of the truth, but -

Sakura beams at him. Her whole person seems to relax, spine straighter, chin up. There is nothing contrite about her now.

Sasuke finds his own scowl smoothing away, somehow. He smiles rarely, but he knows when his features soften.

* * *

 

"You are an  _idiot_ ," Naruto says, less cheerful and more incredulous.

Sasuke ignores him, as he should have in the first place. He's not twelve, he's eighteen. He can ignore stupid insults like - all of Naruto's, actually, are stupid. Naruto's not exactly winning any prizes for maturity and intelligence.

Sasuke has no idea why he puts up with him at all.

And no matter how kind and careful Teuchi is, no matter how he pries into all Naruto's life and none of Sasuke's but meets his gaze occasionally, smiles and tells Sasuke to  _take care of that kid_ when Naruto's run off like a hyperactive chipmunk and left Sasuke footing the bill...

The fact remains that he doesn't even  _like_  ramen.

Naruto waves one hand in front of his face, brandishing chopsticks much too close to his nose. "Sasuke. Earth to Sasuke."

Sasuke turns his face toward Naruto and his pile of empty bowls. "What," he says, and that's a phrase traditionally spelt with a question mark, but it's not really a question.

"Did staring at Sakura's boobs fry your brain so badly you can't talk in full sentences anymore?" Naruto wonders through a mouthful of noodles. "Are you broken?"

Sasuke makes a scornful noise and turns back to his well-prepared but unsatisfying ramen.  _Why_ , seriously?

"Shit," says Naruto. "You  _are_. Do you-"

This is as far as he gets because Sasuke - Sasuke considered punting him out of the ramen stand and into the street, but he's not necessarily strong enough to make the crater Naruto deserves  _and_  get that much distance without leverage or momentum.

Instead he blinks his eyes open, swirling red and black, and Naruto has just enough time to tense up in sudden surprise. "Hey, bastard-!"

He drops like a rock.

Sasuke turns to Teuchi, who glances from him to Naruto and back. Behind the old man's shoulder Sasuke can see Ayame peering curiously. "He'll pay when he wakes up," he tells them blankly.

Then he gets up and leaves.

* * *

 

Naruto's interference means that Sasuke does actually have the awkward realisation that he's not actually  _interested_  in Sakura's boobs.

They're just... there.

This puzzles him, because the boobs thing seems kind of universal, if - oh,  _literally every adult attracted to women around him_ is any population to judge by.

He remembers seeing Ino, once, fend off a lech in the streets. "You can always tell a bottle fed baby," she sneers, and he sees the way the man in question goes red - humiliated, angry. He snarls something rude at her. She flips her hair.

Attraction is, as far as Sasuke can tell, _completely awful_.

He is  _so confused_.

* * *

 

Confusion and distress make Sasuke's temper very short, and his cranky mood does not go unremarked-upon.

Naruto does not help.

In fact, if Sasuke was to estimate, he would say that Naruto was making the most consistent, if not necessarily the most significant, contribution to his foul mood.

"Is it PMS?" Naruto asks, tilting his head curiously. The three of them have time, all at the same time, and they're using it productively in the training grounds. Konoha is usually sunny. It's... nice.

There are, predictably, clones everywhere.

Naruto has his hands folded behind his head and he's - well, the one that's talking is definitely not the one Sasuke needs to pulverise. Making clones talk is a distraction technique. Naruto wouldn't keep his real body outside the range of attack, either.

He -

"SHANNARO," comes a scream, forcing both of them to get the hell out of the way, lest they end up in the same state as the ground, which has just ruptured. Rock is spewing up, streaming past Sasuke in the roar of Sakura's momentum.

Sasuke hears Naruto swear as twelve clones immediately dissipate in a swirl of smoke. His eyes can see Sakura taking advantage of the low visibility for the moment, but he doubts Naruto's can.

Taijutsu against Sakura is a loser's game, so he's not surprised when Naruto replaces himself with a clone and makes himself scarce - and by the time Sakura, snarling, has dispatched that one, Sasuke is there, taking advantage of being the only one of them to use a sword. It's just long enough to keep him out of her reach.

Her eyes narrow, she dodges - the ground shakes beneath his feet, not quite enough to make him stumble, but -

Clones. Clones everywhere. Suddenly Sasuke and Sakura are back to back, fending off a mass clone attack, and Naruto's grating voice is cackling all around them.

"I totally won," Naruto says an hour later, prompting Sasuke to snort derisively.

They've made a mess of the training ground, but that's all right - it's terrain practice for the next group who uses it.

At the far edge, beneath the trees and dappled with afternoon sunlight, the three of them rest. Naruto and Sakura are sprawled on their patch of unbroken earth and grass, basking like lizards in the sun, and Sasuke settles against the base of a tree, well out of the light.

"I punched you through a tree," Sakura says drily.

She had. And if Sasuke had completely lost his footing, well. At least the two of them were distracted right then.

"Sasuke definitely came last," Naruto adds, apparently oblivious to Sakura's point, which... Sasuke doubts is the case. These days Naruto's obliviousness is often very convenient for him.

Usually Sasuke would click his tongue and not deign to answer. "Is that what you were trying to tell me when I was electrocuting you?" he asks now instead, with a hard edge in his voice that makes Sakura glance at him.

Naruto scoffs. "I had to rescue you from  _Sakura_  somewhere in the middle there. She'd have had you with that ground-stomping thing -"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sakura asks in a deceptively mild voice.

Naruto takes the opportunity to panic and freak out, which actually only makes his assurances ring false.

Inevitably, the discussion ends with him crashing through the trunk of another tree. Sasuke watches Sakura adjust one of her gloves with a frown on her face. While Naruto is steaming in his crater some distance away, she turns her eyes on Sasuke.

"You have been... kind of distracted," she tells him. A pause. "It's not affecting anything, but..."

"I'm not distracted," Sasuke says, ignoring the way his own eyes are absolutely fixated on her tugging at the hem of her glove. He's seen her do that in a fight, adjust them for grip - usually before some terrifying and knee-weakening feat of strength.

"Sasuke," she sighs. There's a distinct caution in her when she speaks next, like she's coaxing a wild animal: "As I said, it's not affecting anything, but you have to admit it exists."

_Sasuke has to admit nothing._

" _-_  it's just, you know, if you don't get a handle on it-"

God _dammit._ "Shut up," he snaps.

She flinches.

She's just punched Naruto through a tree but it's him and she flinches, and it just makes him  _angry_. "I don't need fighting tips from  _you_ , Sakura," he snarls.

She smacks the ground with one hand, making a fissure she doesn't even seem to notice. Frustration makes her face flush. "For god's sakes, Sasuke -"

"Shut  _up._ " He's repeating himself, but he just wants her to  _stop_. He doesn't want to discuss this. He doesn't even want to  _think about this_ , he just -

He's standing again before he really even thinks about it.

"Are you  _running away_?" Sakura snarls incredulously, shooting to her feet to match him.

Sasuke ignores her completely, turns on his heel. She won't follow him, she hesitates too much, she -

"SASUKE," her voice cracks in what can only be frustration, and Sasuke's spine meets the trunk of the tree with an unhealthy smacking sound.

She has one hand on his shoulder but the pressure is so strong, so heavy it feels like it's going to grind him into the bark behind him. His breath hitches without warning. He rolls his shoulder under her hand, but she shoves, pushes harder -

Oh.  _Oh_.

His mouth is completely dry.

"Sasuke," she growls, but then she stops, hesitates with her fist balled up, "are you- you're still sweating," her voice is empty, all anger fled. Then, suddenly alarmed, and her expression shifts from furious to concerned in under a second. "You're flushed, I - Sasuke, your pupils are  _huge_  -" her hand snaps forward, not to punch but to take the pulse his neck. Her fingers are deft and certain.

He bats her hand away with his free hand but she smacks it out of her way with an audible  _crack_  and a shock that runs all the way from his fingers to his shoulder.

Then she puts her hand on his neck. Her skin's got calluses.

He sort of... shudders.

Sakura pauses. "Sasuke?"

And Sasuke yanks her hand away, twists her arm to reduce the impact of her hold, breaks free and he  _flees._

(Behind him, with eyebrows raised and a pale blush over her cheeks, Sakura says " _Oh,_ " in a tone of soft wonder.)

* * *

He avoids her.

His temper is a storm in a bottle: his patience is as fragile as glass, and anyone can see the violence waiting underneath.

So Sasuke avoids Sakura, and pretty much everyone avoids Sasuke.

He takes a B-ranked mission to Rock. It’s solo. He likes being alone, he’s good at it.

He’s certainly not _distracted_ when he’s alone.

* * *

 

By the time he returns everybody should have gotten over it, but what actually happens is that Ino and Naruto have _lost their minds._

Shikamaru seems to be a reluctant participant in their plan, but since Sasuke can’t move, he’s not feeling very forgiving.

“Nothing personal,” Shikamaru yawns. “She’s just really loud.”

“When I’m through with you,” says Sasuke seriously, fingers itching for his sword while he stands stock still under Shikamaru’s technique, “ _you’re_ going to be really loud.” _Nothing personal_ , he thinks spitefully.

Shikamaru looks concerned for a brief second, and then he seems to weigh Sasuke’s anger against Ino’s, and, absurdly, Ino comes out on top. “This is so troublesome,” he mutters, but he doesn't let the technique fade.

* * *

This is how Sasuke finds himself deposited in Sakura’s apartment at six in the morning.

They’ve timed it perfectly, because rope-untying jutsu is a genin skill but it still _takes time_. It takes time and honestly _how much rope did they use_?

This, he gathers, was Naruto’s contribution to their scheme, because only Naruto would come up with something simultaneously so stupid and so effective.

Sakura, unsurprisingly, knows as soon as somebody’s in her house.

When she comes to the living space in a too-big shirt with her hair disarrayed and her expression a little grim, she stops.

Sasuke stops as the fourth set of ropes uncoils from around him.

There are still twelve more. Because _Naruto_.

Sakura squints at him. Whatever she was expecting, it probably wasn’t a Sasuke-shaped cocoon on her living room floor at six am.

He glowers up at her.

“Naruto’s an idiot,” she says, propping her hands on her hips. But her mouth is curling. She’s amused. Well -- of course she is. He glares harder.

Eight ropes down, eight to go. “Yes,” says Sasuke, with feeling.

He sort of hopes Sakura will let him go without any awkward -- well, _more awkward_ \-- discussions, but he’s shit out of luck in that regard.

“So,” she says, coming forward and sitting across from him. 

“I think we need to talk.”

“No,” he says, without giving her time to go on. Ten ropes. Come on, _come on_ \--

“No?”

“ _No_.” Twelve. Four to go --

“Would you say yes if I shoved you into something?” she wonders and he has _lost count was that thirteen or fifteen?_

  
“What?” he says, as his brain stutters to a halt.

“Did I get it wrong? ...do you want me to punch you?”

“ _No_ ,” he says immediately, because he has been on the receiving end of those punches. Nobody is _that_ masochistic, surely.

It takes Sasuke a moment to realise he’s stopped untying his ropes and he begins again with a vengeance.

As soon as he’s free, though, Sakura grabs him by the shoulder and casually -- effortlessly -- manhandles him until he’s pressed face-first against the wall of her apartment. She twists one of his arms against his back.

He knows three ways to free himself, more if he doesn’t mind injuring her. He doesn’t even think about any of them.

He shivers instead, and all that time avoiding her, avoiding the thought of this, has made him hypersensitive to it.

Sakura shoves his back, nowhere near as hard as she could, but he can still feel the pressure of his chest and cheek against the wall, the pain in his neck from the angle, the sudden difficulty taking a full breath.

He makes a noise that might be best classified as a whimper.

Uncertainly, Sakura loosens her grip on him. He has enough room to turn, to look at her properly.

He knows what he must look like: flushed, sweating. His eyes are glazed and his pupils are huge and the world seems much too bright. Sakura’s staring at him with all of her attention. Her eyes shift from his mouth to his eyes to the heavy rise and fall of his chest.

“Wow,” she mutters.

He looks away. He’s rarely felt so humiliated and he kind of wants to punch her out of sheer shame and embarrassment.

Bracketed between Sakura’s arms on the wall on either side of him, he can feel the long line of heat in the closeness of her. This close, it would be more natural to touch, but she’s not forcing him there, not even touching him.

“Do you _want_ to go?” she asks carefully.

He stares at her.

He _could_ leave. Maybe she’d fight him for it, a little, but in the end she’d let him go. Of course she would.

“I...”

“Sasuke?”

It‘s _terrifying_. Terrifying and overwhelming. 

“I don’t know.” It costs him something to say it, something that hurts.

Sakura touches his face. Her fingers have familiar calluses. She scrapes her nails through his hair. It’s pleasant, in a purely physical way: shivery delight across his scalp and down his spine.

She draws away, pats him on the arm. “Sleep off the mission,” she suggests gently. “Then figure it out.”

That... sounds like good advice. It’s upsetting. He resents it, in the knee-jerk way that he usually resents good advice. He swallows. Nods mechanically.

Sakura goes back to bed and closes the door firmly behind her, and she leaves Sasuke with a choice.

**Author's Note:**

> So I've never written S/S before and I feel a little weird about it. Often when I read it, it makes me quite uncomfortable. I decided a while back to try writing a kind of S/S I could actually like, but... it didn't happen? And then I wrote this in like two hours today all at once. The deep and confusing magic of writing, I guess.
> 
> Anyway, if there's something you particularly liked or what have you, let me know in the comments. :)


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